Arriving in the nation’s capital from California in my 20s to fill a vacancy in Knight-Ridder Newspapers’ Washington bureau, I came with only minimal guidance from my editors and a short list of people to call on. First was my father, a respected Washington Post White House correspondent. I also paid a visit to the Capitol Hill office of Rep. Phillip Burton, a legendary San Francisco Democrat. Burton, who was Nancy Pelosi’s mentor, was a close friend of my parents. But he died suddenly a year later, at 56. Although I regretted not spending more time with Phil, I ultimately found my own confidant in Democratic Party politics – and much more.
Before leaving the Bay Area – my home paper was the San Jose Mercury News – I’d been told by an editor at the Merc who’d recently come from Washington that if I was writing about Southern politics, I should call a media consultant named Raymond Strother.
Strother was a native Texan who’d come to D.C. by way of Louisiana. Over the years his client roster and that of his firm Strother Duffy Strother (Ray and his son Dane, along with fellow Louisianan Jim Duffy) would include Senators Lloyd Bentsen, Al Gore, Russell Long, Mary Landrieu, John Breaux, and Blanche Lambert-Lincoln. The governors he represented ranged from Bill Clinton and Roy Barnes to Edwin Edwards and Buddy Roemer. The client he most revered was a House member from Georgia, civil rights era icon John Lewis.
Ray worked nationally, too, and I first encountered him working, not for one of his Southern clients, but for Gary Hart, the intellectually energetic Colorado senator who shook the Democratic establishment in 1984 by nearly winning the presidential nomination.
Strother was the best kind of news source, rare even in those less tendentious times: highly partisan but also highly principled. He was well-informed, witty, and astute. His insight was no accident. Ray was well read, and both a student and innovative practitioner of modern U.S. politics. He was an uncommonly good listener. A journalism major at LSU – he would teach journalism after retiring – Ray gravitated toward political reporters he liked. I was one of them, which turned into one of the greatest blessings of my life.
A nonpartisan journalist by breeding, training, and temperament, I can count on one hand the true friends I’ve made who were active in party politics. Ray was one of them. Our families became close, too. We’re still close, but grieving: Raymond D. Strother passed away Saturday morning in Billings, Montana. He was 81. He’d fought cancer bravely for six years, enduring the pain because, as he told his son two weeks ago, “There is still more to do. And there is still more to say.”
Alas, cancer wouldn’t wait any longer. Ray went peacefully with his children – Dane and Kristan – and his wife Sandy by his side. He is missed already, and not just in Montana, but in many places. He was a singular force in this world and can never be replaced.
“‘Boss,’ as he liked to be called later in life, was a craftsman in every respect,” Jim Duffy told me when we got the news. “But his talents weren’t confined to political advertising. Tell him you needed a coffee table and six months later a beautiful piece of furniture would arrive at your doorstep. Even when he was very sick, he was still in the kitchen creating wonderful meals. He was happy to learn last year you could get tasso – a tasty cured meat – shipped to Montana from LaPlace, Louisiana. He was both a mentor and a friend. We shared so much in common from our Louisiana roots, our love of politics, and most of all the joy of telling stories about the things we had seen and done.”
* * *
Ray Strother was a storyteller, all right, as am I, and we clicked immediately. In one of our earliest conversations, we learned that each of us had paper routes as boys – he for the Port Arthur News, I for the San Francisco Chronicle. We both considered the news business a noble enterprise. Early in his career, however, Ray felt drawn to the other side of the camera, as it were. To be in the arena as a participant, not a chronicler. He felt that was a noble mission, too. At the 2003 Virginia Book Festival in Charlottesville, while describing his memoir, Ray put it this way:
I grew up in a lower middle-class house where politics mattered to our lives. People like my family had no other place to turn. I remember as a very small child praying at night to Harry Truman. My father taught me that you had to stand on the picket line against the clubs of the Texas Ranger thugs and you had to get involved in politics – because people like us had no other choice. So, I became a political consultant. It was a calling like the ministry.
That book, which I helped edit, is titled “Falling Up: How a Redneck Helped Invent Political Consulting.” It was, in Ray’s description, more than an autobiography. It was also his attempt to explore “the larger consequences of our profession on democracy.”
Political consulting is a rough business. It requires no license, no college degree, no experience. All one needs to open a practice are a business card and some contacts in one of the political party offices who know even less than you… Not to say they are all hacks. Some of the brightest and most principled people I know are consultants and I am proud to be in their number. Initially, they came into the business in an attempt to involve themselves nobly in the process of democracy. Some of us looked up one day and found our bank accounts overflowing and were amazed. We were also too pleased to spend much time wondering what compromises we had made along the way – or what we had done to American politics.
Before the advent of television, let alone the Internet, candidates for public office had always had political advisers whispering in their ears – loyalists and hired guns who helped write speeches, design campaign slogans, hash out policy proposals and party flatforms. But the media age brought a new kind of adviser to the fore, advertising men (and in the early days they were all men) who didn’t necessarily know much about politics or public policy. They merely sold candidates like soap. In “The Selling of the President,” Joe McGinnis drew back the curtain and introduced Americans to the new kind of campaign, this one circa 1968. Readers learned about a marketing whiz named Harry W. Treleaven Jr., who’d previously sold Americans on the virtues of Pan American Airways and the Ford Motor Co. In 1968, his task was to distract voters from Richard Nixon’s problematic personality.
Another figure in McGinnis’ book was a then-unknown TV news producer named Roger Ailes. While working on “The Mike Douglas Show” in 1967, Ailes engaged Nixon in pre-show conversation. Nixon was grousing about even having to appear on television, a medium he dismissed as “a gimmick.” Television was not a gimmick, the young producer told the Republican candidate who had narrowly lost the 1960 presidential contest to John F. Kennedy and had been defeated two years later in California’s gubernatorial race by a landslide. “And if you think that,” Ailes added, “you’ll lose again.” Ailes was promptly hired by the Nixon campaign to direct the candidate’s TV strategy.
This was Ray Strother’s milieu, the budding profession of TV media strategist, although in those early days, Ray often wrote the candidates’ speeches, as well as the television spots, operated the camera, edited the film, and figured out where ads should air. His first campaign as a professional consultant was a 1966 statewide race for Louisiana treasurer. His candidate, whom he helped guide to a decisive win, was Mary Evelyn Parker, the first woman ever to hold the job. Ray once described her as “one of the ablest public figures in America.”
Parker had been on the debate team at Northwestern State University in the Louisiana town of Natchitoches, the same school Ray had attended on a track scholarship – and the school he’d been invited to leave by a college administration displeased with his liberal political activities. LSU proved a better fit, but Northwestern State is also the last college where Ray held court: as a teacher in the journalism school. He loved the school, and he invited me and other friends to speak to his classes. I saw what he liked about it. Northwestern State kids also came from working-class families – diverse demographically, but not economically – and most of them weren’t going anywhere in journalism. But some had a chance, and Ray wanted to help them. They reminded him of himself when he’d come out of Port Arthur in the early 1960s.
Northwestern State was the second institution of higher learning where Ray Strother and I intersected together with students. The first was Harvard. He and I were both fellows at the university’s Institute of Politics, Ray in 1999, I in 2007. Each of us invited the other to speak to his study group, and each of us learned the same lesson at Harvard, too – namely, that reverse snobbery is just as odious as the original kind, perhaps with less to recommend it. Which is my way of saying that Ray and I loved the students we met in Cambridge and stayed in touch with many of them.
I learned other life lessons in Ray’s presence. He taught me to appreciate single-malt Scotch and how to fly-fish. While covering the White House for the Baltimore Sun, I spent one of my birthdays in the 1990s on the road. One night, while Bill Clinton was giving a speech in New Orleans that I’d heard a dozen times, I asked a colleague from a rival newspaper if I could duck out for a while. I explained that I had a chance to meet Ray Strother for dinner in the French Quarter. The other reporter knew Strother and said it was the best excuse he’d ever heard for playing hooky – and that he’d cover for me. Ray and I met at Antoine’s, where Ray’s picture was still on the wall from his Louisiana days. At dinner Ray presented me with a birthday present – an Orvis fly reel. Come to think of it, he essentially gave me Montana itself as a gift. In 1994, he handed me the keys to Heroes, his cabin on the Big Hole River, and I took my family there for a two-week vacation. I fell in love with the river and Big Sky country.
And so, the man who started as a news source was by then a friend. We fished Montana’s streams and ponds, went to racetracks in Maryland and West Virginia, watched football on television at our houses, played poker in Northern Virginia and dice in Las Vegas. Once, we took a break from our labors at the Caesar’s Palace casino to drive to Hoover Dam where we hiked the shores of Lake Meade. Ray chuckled when he saw the sign for the dam. He grew up in a house where a variation of that word substituted for Herbert Hoover’s first name, as in “Damned Hoover,” which was how his father generally referred to the 31st U.S. president.
Ray lost his only brother in Vietnam. Claud Paul Strother was a 26-year-old Army helicopter pilot, who died a few days before he was to rotate out of the country. Ray mourned Claud all his life and always took a dim view of politicians who pounded the drums of war but who had avoided combat themselves. Likewise, he venerated those who had gone to war for this country, whether the action took place in An Khe Pass or the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Over time, Ray’s congenital soft spot for political rogues hardened into a contempt for politicians whose colorful personalities were masquerades for their thievery. These colorful crooks ranged from the notorious (and future federal prisoner) Edwin Edwards to Jimmie Davis, the “singing governor” first elected in 1944, who tried a comeback in 1971. Raymond handled media relations on that campaign: a press secretary who wasn’t allowed to talk to the press. Although Davis finished fourth, he warbled his signature number, “You Are My Sunshine” at dozens of events, apparently pocketing cash at every stop. Strother’s vivid descriptions of such campaigns, shared by the fire while the whiskey flowed, were humorous, but Ray wasn’t really amused. Political corruption disgusted him. But sometimes the lines weren’t clearcut.
In the 1987 gubernatorial race, a series of brilliant Strother television ads had catapulted reform-minded congressman Buddy Roemer, a Harvard man, from fifth place into a stunning upset win over former Edwin Edwards and a field of traditional Louisiana Democrats. Four years later, the stars did not align as well.
As the national Democratic Party moved further left, Roemer upended his own reelection campaign by switching parties in March 1991. The move made superficial sense: Roemer was really too conservative to be a Democrat and too liberal to be a Republican – and America has no viable third political party. So as his state trended toward the GOP, Roemer figured he’d follow the prevailing winds.
The problem with this decision was manifest. For starters, despite blithe assurances from the White House operatives working for George H.W. Bush, the conservative voters who made up the Republican base were never going to consider the pro-choice, environmentalist Roemer as one of them. In addition, Roemer hadn’t bothered to consult the local GOP, so the Republican establishment fielded its own candidate. Roemer’s defection also left the Democratic Party side of the ledger wide open. Nature abhors a vacuum, as the saying goes, and it was filled by Edwin Edwards’ considerable ego. The legendary libertine, who’d beaten corruption charges in state court, saw an opening to occupy the governor’s mansion for a fourth term. All this was bad enough, but then avowed white supremacist David Duke announced his candidacy as a Republican. Roemer risked being the third man out unless Strother could duplicate his 1987 magic. But his firm couldn’t work without alienating the Democratic National Committee, and in so doing put its very existence in jeopardy.
It should have been an easy call. But things were going on in Ray’s life (and in Roemer’s) that made the choice anything but easy. The governor’s wife Patti had left him abruptly. Ray’s wife Sandy was taking a hiatus, too, meaning Ray had less to tie him to his house on Capitol Hill or his Montana getaway. In the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau, I’d become the resident go-to reporter on Louisiana politics, and on a trip there I found that Ray was essentially living in a spare room in the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge – and was staying with him despite the party switch. The conversation between Ray and his desperate client had gone like this:
“Raymond, if I went to prison, you’d bring me cigarettes?”
“Sure, Buddy.”
“And if got sick, you’d give me blood?”
“Of course.”
“If I came to your door hungry, you’d feed me?”
“Yes.”
“But if I change parties, you run like a scalded dog?
“I’m still running against Edwin Edwards and David Duke,” Roemer added. “I’m still running against corruption and hate…”
And so, Ray, who had always loathed racism and had come to see corruption as invidious, was hooked. But there was no helping that campaign. Roemer never saw the danger that Duke, and his hidden support among white voters, posed to his campaign. Ray and the Republicans working with him on the governor’s behalf did see the threat belatedly, but Roemer refused to run the Strother ads designed to scare the bejesus out of middle-class voters on the grounds that electing Duke would make the state a pariah and crater everything from New Orleans’ tourist-dependent economy to LSU’s ability to recruit professors and football players. Roemer vetoed the ad and then was blind-sided by a $400,000 anti-Roemer ad buy by the owner of one of the state’s biggest polluters – a company Roemer’s administration had fined. Roemer finished third in voting, meaning he didn’t make the runoff.
I was in New Orleans, and seeing the handwriting on the wall drove over to Baton Rouge to console Ray. He retrieved his clothes from the governor’s mansion and retreated for solace to the home of a friend and fellow Renaissance man named Louis Faxon. Lou had been a football and track star in high school in Minnesota and a Korean War combat pilot, before coming an architect and LSU instructor. Faxon was the kind of man who served as president of the board of the Baton Rouge Symphony, but who had cleared out the furniture in his living room for a pool table. It was a Saturday – primary day in Louisiana – and we drank beer, played eight-ball, and watched LSU play Kentucky in football while waiting for the election returns to come in.
LSU won, but Buddy Roemer didn’t make the runoff. All was not lost, however: Sandy flew in from Washington, kicking off the personal reconciliation that would last the rest of Ray’s life. Ray and I drove to New Orleans the next day to see the Saints play in the Louisiana Superdome. Bill Morgan, a Strother friend who’d produced Edwards’ ads, asked Ray to visit his box. After the obligatory needling, they asked Ray about the never-aired TV spots he’d produced going after David Duke on the grounds that his election would unleashed a fierce downward spiral on the state’s economy.
Ray hitched a ride back to Baton Rouge with Morgan, who was all ears. That night, Ray got a call from Edwards, who listened to Ray’s ideas before signing off in Edwards fashion – a puckish reference to Ray’s extended visits to the mansion. “When I am elected,” Edwards quipped, “you can stay in your bedroom at the end of the hall.” Actually, after the 1991 gubernatorial race, Ray was done with corrupt politicians. The Edwards-Duke race was unfinished business, however, one encapsulated for Ray by the bumper stickers that popped up that autumn: “Vote For the Crook. It’s Important.”
A month later, Edwards demolished Duke in the runoff. I spent that afternoon with Ray while making a private decision of my own: I concluded that I should quietly recuse myself from covering Ray’s campaigns. We’d become too close for me to be objective.
I did have one more go-round with Buddy Roemer, however. In 2012, he mounted a quixotic campaign for president. Ever the reformer, Buddy capped campaign contributions to $100 per person – no corporations of political action committees need apply. This self-imposed limit had a predictable effect: Buddy couldn’t raise enough money to air ads, and consequently, couldn’t rise in the polls enough to meet the threshold level of support that would allow him to participate in the GOP primary debates. (I caught up with him on debate night in New Hampshire where he watched the debate from the couch in the apartment building of his campaign spokesman, Carlos Sierra, while offering a running commentary for the assembled reporters. Exactly three of us showed up. Buddy was his typical self: insightful, if naïve. When I reminded him of our past with Ray, he sighed wistfully. “Ah, those days …” he said, his voice trailing off.)
Most of the players in that old drama are gone now. Buddy, who had diabetes, died last year at age 77. “Fast Eddie” Edwards went two months later. He’d made it to 93. Lou Faxon was 85 when he left this world six years ago. As I think of it, only David Duke is alive among that group, which hardly seems fair. But as a famous Democratic president said, “Life is unfair.” Or maybe a better way to think about this, as our friends leave us, is as Abraham Lincoln phrased it in his second inaugural address, “The Almighty has His own purposes.”
I suppose I’m stalling now. A good writer knows when to land a piece, even one written from the heart. But recalling my adventures with “Boss” Strother forestalls facing the inexorable reality of never being able to talk to him again. Or fish with him, or cook with him, or go to the racetrack with him, or trade books with him, or talk politics with him. The last time I saw Ray was on a Zoom call for our youngest daughter’s birthday. Sandy and Ray, Grace’s godparents, always answered the bell for such family events. But a pandemic can be hell on friendships, especially if your friend is fighting cancer.
Two nights ago, while looking in the closet for a raincoat, I came across a chef’s smock with my name stitched on it, a reminder of a Strother-Cannon caper that began at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in the late 1990s, and nearly caused an international incident. I exaggerate, but bear with me. Sitting in our tuxedos at the Hilton Hotel bar after the annual dinner, Ray and I concocted a Scotch-fueled plan to host a New Year’s Eve dinner for a few friends. The women would wear fancy dresses and the men would don black tie. What about a theme? I think it was me who suggested the cuisine of every country America had conquered militarily. Yes, that’s politically incorrect, but it was 25 years ago, too. Before the night of the nine-course meal arrived, Ray and I had the same second thoughts. So, without ever discussing it, we independently began researching readings that venerated the nations and cultures whose food we were celebrating. I read from Chief Joseph, Ray from Churchill, and so on. Pretty soon the guests joined in, raiding my library for similar readings. We felt we’d redeemed ourselves, even if a year later, when Ray called from Italy where he was teaching a class. “Cannon, we’re infamous!” he reported gleefully. It turns out that when he was introduced to the class, one of the Italian students asked. “Are you the man who held the Conquest Dinner?”
We changed themes the next year, and kept the tradition going – with the readings ultimately outshining the food – even after Ray and Sandy left for Bozeman. From a distance, we’d read each other’s writings and of course talk politics. Ray thought I was too easy on Republicans, especially Ronald Reagan. One time, I had the temerity to admit how much I admired Herbert “Damned” Hoover, and pointed out that his boyhood hero Harry Truman did, too. He didn’t give any ground there. But I did change his mind on one occasion, although not about any Republicans. When he expressed support for capital punishment one day, I told him I was opposed to it and walked him through my reasons. A few weeks later, he told me he’d thought about what I said, and had changed his view. How often does that happen in life, with anyone?
But that was Raymond. He had an open mind as well as an open heart. He was always thinking about politics and government, and the civic affairs of humankind. He cared about his family, his friends, his profession, his river, and his country. Ray Strother gave a damn.
So long, Boss.
